Salmond resigns

[Baxter Parp]

I'm not a racist bigot like yourself.

The evidence is clear, chumbo.x

[Baxter Parp]

Widnae

"has never"

My interpretation, there.

[bowmore]

Love him or hate him, here's George on Alex.

Alex Salmond and I were both born in Scotland in 1954. Lucky us. A bit before or a little later life would never have been so sweet for us, growing up in the Labour-created consensus of welfare state Britain.

Like me, Alex got a council house, a free education (him at one of the world’s great universities, St Andrews, and he got a grant), cod liver oil and orange juice, an NHS, unemployment pay, a rising state pension, strong British trades unions, and a BBC that was the envy of the world.

I only mention it because I just bought the new Salmond biography, Against The Odds, and discovered in the first few pages, and all over again, where I profoundly differ from him.

There was his childhood hero, the Welsh “second home” country-cottage burner RS Thomas.

Salmond, according to his biographer David Torrance, was a fan of this passage from Thomas: “For it is England … that has been the winter on our native pastures and we must break their grip, and the grip of all the Quislings … ” In that line, we have the Nationalist credo. Perverse, isn’t it? Those of us who don’t want to break up this small country are “Quislings” – even though we are the majority of Scots.

When there is “winter” on our native pastures, it is “England” that is responsible for the cold bitter rain.

No matter that all of Salmond’s privileged young life was made possible by “Quislings” who elected Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Willie Ross – and long before Orkney and Shetland’s North Sea oil came on stream.

This language of Quislings and English winter is all the more remarkable considering the era we grew up in.

When the universality of Che Guevara was on offer, how weird to choose as your poster boy a Celtic obscurantist who supported burning out his neighbours just because they were English? How weird to choose a party led by Dundee MP Gordon Wilson, in whose very office Salmond joined up? Wilson described the English as a “jackboot” on Scotland and at the 1992 SNP conference told the delegates: “I know who the enemies of Scotland are … and they include George Galloway.”

So, there you have it: I’m an “enemy of the people” for them.

A good friend of mine advised me not to mix it with the narrow-Nats. He thinks it might cost me my seat in the Scottish parliament elections.

I want to win the Glasgow seat but not enough to lie about where I stand. I can never, ever see the hundreds of thousands of English workers who marched with us in London on Saturday as a “jackboot,” a “winter”, or anything other than a part of me.

Neither will Brian Souter, the SNP’s main funder and bus magnate, ever have anything in common with me other than place of birth (never mind his peculiar views on sexuality).

I just can’t look at life like that. Where and when you were born is just a matter of luck.

Good luck for me and Alex.